You can practice photography wherever you go

Here are a few photos that I took whilst out in the woods walking Eli - so even out with a 2 year old husky it is still possible to grab a few nice shots.

The point I'm trying to make is that you can take your camera out and about with you in your everyday life and practice your photography whenever you want to, even if it's just ten minutes here and there, the more photos you take the better you get, practice, practice, practice.

Things to think about when out with your camera include - composition - what are you looking at that you want to share with the rest of the world?

Think about exactly what you are putting in the frame of your image - Digital cameras have LCD screens - these have a couple of great uses - firstly you can see the image you have just taken straight away, thus enabling you to then see if there are distracting objects in your photo that you would rather not have there, so instead of having to crop them out later or trying to photo shop them out later, you can see immediately and re-shoot the image minus the distracting element.

The second good thing about your LCD screen is that you can view the histogram of the image on it. Sometimes if you are in bright sunshine or under trees and the LCD is hard to see - making you question whether or not the photo is correctly exposed, the best thing to do is check your histogram - do this whilst you are still by the scene you photographed - once again if the histogram is telling you it is over or under exposed you then have the opportunity to re-shoot with altered settings - get it right in the camera whilst on location and then you wont hate yourself later for coming home with disappointing images. Remember in the world of the digital image - you can take a dozen photos of the same view and different settings - it doesn't cost anymore - you don't have film to worry about and when you get home you can always delete the bad ones - but at home you can always look at the file info on your images and see what worked best - this also helps with your learning curve for camera settings and understanding light.

If you would like to learn more why not join one of my photographic workshops, we cover some great locations with more being added all of the time. Just call me or email for more information.

Tomorrow I will discuss f/stops, what they do and why and when to change them.